Language Log extols Edinburgh Uni’s results in the UK’s RAE
“But with these figures out, even these shy people will have to admit, if pressed, that if you want to study in the biggest language sciences community in the U.K., and the best one as judged by volume of work judged to be of world-leading quality, it looks like you should make plans to head for Edinburgh.”
As a graduate, all I can say is, heck yeah.
I don’t often create posts that involve extensive quotations from other blogs, but I so enjoyed Prof. Pullum’s Language Log entry on vagueness and British weather that I feel compelled to quote it here:
Those many idealistic souls who imagine that we would do better with a language that was free of vagueness and ambiguity, its terms tightly defined so that the meaning of what we said would always be sharp and clear, forget about tasks like trying to summarize British weather in a few seconds before the news headlines. In that context you’re glad of vague hand-waving idioms of generality like by and large, and hedging adverbs like pretty, and sweeping emotion-laden adjectives ranging from human psychology to impressionistic meteorology, like miserable.
The weather as I write (it’s after 9 a.m. now, so already the sky is light here in Scotland) is cool and damp. There is a hint of sunshine from behind the thin cloud cover. Edinburgh castle will look extraordinary as always, a brooding grey mass of damp stone a thousand years old overlooking the Princes Street gardens, with hints of sun catching it from some low angle. It’s extraordinarily beautiful. Yes, there will be rain and wind some time today, and freezing temperatures in some parts of the country. But it’s easier to enjoy than it is to summarize. Humphrys was just enacting the usual British linguistic ritual of weather-grumbling. The weather isn’t literally misery-inducing. I take a certain delight in it.
In a few beautifully-constructed phrases, Prof. Pullum evokes the beauty of Edinburgh, captures the enjoyable misery of British weather, and explains the need for linguistic ambiguity. He shows himself to be a master of language in more than the purely scientific sense.
A while back I bought an LG Dare. Mostly I like it fairly well, but it has a couple of problems — even leaving aside the fact that it’s now restarted spontaneously four times since I bought it.
One is that it’s hard for it to distinguish between scrolling and selecting. Oddly, the browser and the other functions seem to have different prejudices. The browser tends to scroll when I’m trying to select, and the phonebook and menus tend to select when I’m trying to scroll. You get better at it, but it’s still not perfect.
The other is that it hates commas. And apostrophes, in some cases.
I use a lot of commas when I write email, and even when I write texts or notes. I like commas. Unfortunately, the comma is not on the main QWERTY soft keyboard, nor is it the second option on the T9 punctuation softkey like it used to be. Instead, they prefer @. I understand that @ is used in email addresses, but I honestly do not type email addresses very often unless I’m in an address field (which is less common than being in a text field) and I don’t think I’m very unusual in this regard. Certainly not in text messages, and rarely in the browser. And while I like having the .com key occasionally, I’d really rather have a comma.
The extra keys available on the regular QWERTY change depending on context, but the one I really want, the [, ‘] option, is never available. In the text messager, it’s [@’] (so I have to shift for ‘) and [.?] (logical). In the browser, it’s [.com], [.] and [/], so neither , nor ‘ is available in QWERTY and I have to switch into symbols for either and press shift to get to the ‘. Argh. I don’t often need to type a URL when I’m in an input field in the browser, only if I’m in the address bar, which is a totally different thing. Why give me those keys? I need my complex clauses and contractions! With apostrophes. No “its cold outside” for this linguist.
The issue of accessing the symbols keyboard brings me to my second major keyboard complaint. Like the iPhone, the QWERTY soft keyboard on the Dare has a switcher-key that turns it to numbers and symbols. However, unlike the iPhone, it has two keys: one for QWERTY and one for symbols. This is less than ideal. The iPhone guys thought this through and realized: if you’re in symbols already, you don’t need the symbol key. Ditto QWERTY. So they gave just one key, which toggles back and forth.
Unfortunately, LG was not that clever, so there are two keys. The ‘reason’, I think is, that in the browser the QWERTY key can also be used to access accented letters, but there’s gotta be a more clever way of doing that than always taking up precious screen real-estate (the Dare has a smaller screen than the iPhone, although a larger keyboard because the QWERTY goes across the long side) with two keys.
All this makes typing on the Dare a much longer and more complex process than it should be, diminishing the practical usefulness of being able to type faster on the QWERTY.
Give me punctuation or give me a red pen!
This is my personal blog, not a topical blog, but I find myself unable to say anything terribly original or interesting about the election per se. Like many Californians, I am thrilled by Obama’s election, and terribly disappointed that it looks like Prop 8 may pass. However! They have not counted my ballot yet (vote-by-mail ballots submitted on Election Day have not been counted; more than 3 million ballots remain to be counted) so I will hold out a small hope yet. Other smaller happinesses (Prop 1A, Prop 2) abound. So, I resort to interesting linguistics:
“It felt very, like, moving.”
I heard this on the Caltrain shuttle tonight, and it constitutes one amusing linguistic tidbit regarding the election. No doubt I’ve said things that sounded equally empty-headed because I put ‘like’ in at an inopportune moment, but this one struck me as funny.
The other interesting linguistic bit was McCain’s use of “an historic” in his speech, and what happened to it afterwards. We were watching Fox News at the time (why? I don’t know) and they were putting pull quotes in the little “Alert” box. When they did this, they changed it to “a historic moment”. MSNBC, though, has the correct version in their story.
“An historic” is an interesting pattern. I don’t use it; it’s almost exclusively used by older people, who I think learned, or were explicitly taught, to use “an” before words starting with H (that are not stressed on the first syllable, a restriction I was not aware of explicitly until looking it up for this entry). It’s described well on this page. The origin is from British h-dropping, which later receded, leaving this little island of confusion. I was surprised to see Fox News ‘correcting’ McCain’s correct, if less common, usage. Did they do it for familiarity? Or because they really thought he misspoke?
I really enjoy being a bona fide professional linguist, with said title on my business card, but I have found a title that is, I think, even cooler, belonging to Jesse Sheidlower (whose surname I would dearly love to know how to pronounce). Jesse is, according to his byline on this Slate article about Sarah Palin’s accent, editor at large of the Oxford English Dictionary. Beat that for pure awesome.
I never knew there was an Alaskan accent (or even, more than one). You learn something new every day.
I don’t plan to make a habit of this, but I would like to say that I think Language Log has thoroughly worn out its/their welcome on entries that solely constitute being peeved by people being peeved about (various things) about language.
It’s still moderately interesting when they explore the history and usage of the construction that the person is peeved about, but this entry of Pullum’s (don’t go read it, I link only for the record) is content-free except for complaining (sans data) that there is no reason to be peeved about these peeves. This is almost vacuous and is certainly obvious considering the list is so long and includes so many inoffensive words and phrases.
This will be the last time that I peeveblog about peeveblogging about peeves.
I thought I might be imagining it, but I don’t think so anymore: Language Log is getting less focused and less good than it used to be.
Bill Poser today wrote an entry about how runners hear the start gun at different times because of the speed of sound in air. The ‘hook’ used to relate this to linguistics is that if people studied acoustic phonetics, they would know this was a problem.
Yes…but if they studied physics, or even general science, they would know this too. I am not impressed with this as a linguistics hook. Sorry, but Language Log is supposed to be about linguistics, not about the fairness of Olympic track racing. Read down the list of recent entries, and then browse through a segment of LL Classic and see what you think about their relative interestingness.
I don’t know if this is an affliction common to blogs, but I’ve seen it happen to several. BoingBoing, which was once what its tagline claims (a directory of wonderful things) has become highly political. I still find it interesting to check out, but the slant on the politics is also high (unclear incidents of civil liberty violations are made to sound highly inflammatory), and that makes it even less interesting than just politics (which after all is also interesting, though perhaps not always wonderful).
Both BB and LL also added comments fairly recently. The comments sections are generally better than average, but they rarely add much to the original entry. I preferred both blogs when you had to email the original poster to comment, even though your words were subject to their whims. (My comments were mentioned or published a couple of times on both BB and LL, which was neat, but that’s neither here nor there.) This has contributed to my current feelings about their decline — which is funny because I can always just skip the comments if I don’t want to read them.
Reading Barbara’s lovely discussion about “how local to go”, I was blindsided by this amazing sentence:
Cornmeal, we know from, but millet — to most Appalachians, that stuff is birdseed.
The “we know from” construction is fairly familiar to me from informal speech and writing. It’s a favorite of Sars. A few examples from her:
I’ve been known to use it myself, although mostly self-consciously, to present a jokingly exaggerated portrait of my knowledge about some area. There are no uses of it in my blogging at all, so I can only suppose that I might say something like “I’m a linguist, so I know from dialects!” It’s a hard construction to search for on Google, because “know from X” is also the first part the standard structure “know from X that Y”, which is why I turned to Tomato Nation for examples.
I don’t really want to get into discussing the “properness” of this structure (some people hate it) or its origin. What really struck me about Barbara’s sentence, though, was the effect of combination with topic-fronting: Instead of saying “We know from X” (X = cornmeal), she writes “X, we know from”. This is just standard topic-fronting, which is a common discourse pattern.
But the combination of the two yields a sentence unusual enough to catch my eye, unusual enough that several people I sent it to said it seemed confusing to them, especially on first reading. Quite an interesting result.
Update:
Jesse points out in the comments that a more sophisticated Google search can find some examples, such as:
PS: Your iPod doesn’t know from romance
Barbecue? I know from barbecue…
Since Five I Know From Funny
Not surprisingly, when I created a Wordle it came out with a lot of cycling words.
Hat tip: Annie Mole
I almost have a hard time believing this, except that there are so many Google results for the word:
People ask Yahoo Answers a lot of strange questions, including many that would be best answered by a dictionary and another whole batch that would be best answered by a philosopher, plus a lot of others that just really aren’t the Internet’s business, but this one just kind of bowled me over.
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